“Okay, then.” A waiter set a flute of champagne in front of Georgie, and she picked it up.
He smiled at her, his dark eyes warming. “You could tell something was amiss.”
She nodded and sipped the champagne. “I don’t play a stringed instrument, so I don’t know the parts.”
Alex leaned in, his long, dark eyes searching hers for a moment. “All right.”
“All right, what?” Georgie asked, confused.
He turned his head, but his eyes never left hers. “Flicka, you’ll arrange this impromptu performance?”
Flicka stood and smoothed down her pale blue silk dress that skimmed her slim body. “I would like nothing better.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Georgie said, even though she didn’t want to look away from Alex’s dark eyes. “I don’t want to make a spectacle of myself.”
Alex reached over and took her hand. He was still staring at her like he was fascinated, like he didn’t want to look away. His sharp gaze didn’t so much resemble a snake mesmerizing prey as an artist evaluating a brilliant sunset. “I’ll help you. If Flicka says you’re good, then you must be quite interesting.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Georgie didn’t move her hand out of his warm palm. The deep calluses on his fingertips spoke of thousands of hours of practice.
He stood, tugging her to her feet by her fingertips and his gaze in her eyes. “I’ll get you through this. Flicka, we’ll do one song. Give us an hour to prepare.”
Georgie couldn’t believe that her feet followed Alex as he led her out of the reception, but she owed Flicka anything that she wanted, and the piano called her.
A Hateful Eye
Alexandre de Valentinois
Alexandre knew that he absolutely should not sing, no matter what Flicka demanded. He raised his hand to dissuade her, but Flicka was already turning back to her husband Pierre, the Rat Bastard, with a mischievous glint in her bright green eyes.
Their friends at the wedding surrounded them. If he made a scene, they would think he was being churlish.
His raw throat felt shredded every time he swallowed, even though he had barely said a word the night before at Flicka’s wedding and reception. His date, the Czech model Zuzana, had prattled all night about the fashions that some people dared to wear in public. When she began to trash Flicka’s Elie Saab Couture reception dress, Alexandre had insisted, quietly, that she desist because his new cousin and old school friend was not maudlin and middle-brow.
All night, Zuzana reveled in her disdain for everything.
He would have a word with his people later. They had arranged the date with the hot, new Czech model at the last minute when he had told them that he would be in Europe, after her people had pestered his people for months to arrange an introduction. She had been ecstatic at the prospect of going to the royal wedding, or so he had been told. Once there, her harsh opinions of everything tested Alexandre’s reserve.
Plus, when they had danced, her skeletal form in his arms had repulsed him. The photographers exclaimed over her slanted, teal eyes, but the rest of the package left much to be desired.
And she ate nothing but vodka.
By the end of the evening, Alexandre had absolutely no desire to fuck her, worried that he would break her bony body and nauseated that she might further turn that hateful eye on his friends and loved ones, so he played the French nobleman and kissed Zuzana’s knuckles as he dropped her off at her hotel and instructed his driver to step on it before she turned into a giant, gaunt bat.
Now, in the presence of this lithe young woman, Georgiana, the one who had heard that mistuned string in the Ravel quartet that had ricocheted through the room like a scarlet lightning bolt appearing in the bright yellow sunshine and had Flicka’s admiration for her Chopin, his body was reminding him that he hadn’t been with a woman in a long time, a very long time. Months.
He counted up the months to an alarming number.
Inwardly, he frowned. His ancestors would have been appalled that he hadn’t tupped a serving wench in the interim, but his whole being had vibrated with stress the last few years, and his schedule left no time for carousing or a decent night’s sleep or a meal not eaten from a foam container in the back of a car or off a room service cart in the dark before dawn.
Georgiana had a—what was that called?—a sweetheart bow for a mouth, with her full, soft, baby lips that looked almost like a heart, and her light brown eyes were wide and round. Her skin looked soft, like he could wrap his hands around her and not cut himself, an important trait he hadn’t thought to list before last night. He leaned toward her, drawn. The air around her was scented with white flowers and cake, and the creamy notes sounded in his mind like a cello.
Right now, the most luxurious thing he could think of, after dining at Wulfram’s reception, was to polish off a bottle of champagne with this woman and talk about music, deep music, real music.
Georgiana turned her large, hazel eyes up to him, and great God above, she smiled.
Maybe he could sing just one song, just to get her alone to talk about music for a few hours.
In the Style of Rachmaninoff
Georgie
Georgie and Alex trotted past the jubilation of yellow and green flowers spraying from vases in the hotel lobby. Sunshine glared through the glass doors, and the people walking by on the sidewalk outside were just dark silhouettes. The desk clerk directed them to a piano tucked away in a corner behind a wall of potted trees and overstuffed flower vases. Georgie sat on the padded piano bench and stretched her hands, pulling her fingers back and out, but she didn’t touch the keys.
When she looked up, Alex was leaning on his elbows on the piano, his long, strong hands folded in front of him, watching her.
Georgie swallowed hard. “I don’t know why I even came down here. I can’t do this.”
“Can’t play the piano?” he asked. The confusion in his dark eyes was so palpable that she could almost see him calculating how on Earth Flicka could have been so mistaken.
“Oh, God, no. I love the piano. The Steinway in there looks like an impressive instrument. I just can’t perform.”
“Why not?” he asked.
Ye gods, what a loaded question. “I just haven’t for so long. I just can’t.”
“You don’t perform at all?”
“Not since Tanglewood. Flicka watched the last time I played in public.”
“My God.” His horrified eyes watched her. “You can’t stand in front of a crowd? You don’t need it?”
All those people looking at her, judging her, their eyes measuring every hesitation and snickering at every missed note until she stuttered to a panic-frozen stop. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Is it that you can’t perform in front of a large crowd? Or is there a limit as to how many people?”
Even just him standing there was too much. “I was always nervous about performing. At Tanglewood, Flicka would talk me into going out on the stage, but I’ve never liked it. When I stopped taking formal lessons, it got worse. A lot worse. I don’t play for anybody.”
Like she went to the music department at four in the morning to practice so the whole, enormous building would be empty and there would be walls and dead space and more walls between herself and any listening ears.
Alex said, so quietly, “Play something for me.”
Her hands stretched over the keys, and she tried to push them down to play even a major chord, but as soon as a key neared the break point, just when the hammer inside the piano was poised to strike the string, something in her mind shouted Don’t! and she couldn’t press it.
Alex asked gently, “Does Flicka know you’re worse?”
“I don’t see how she would. We’ve been out of touch for a few years.”
“But she knows that you’ve got—” he paused, obviously considering whether to say the terrible words, “a problem with this.”
“She must have forgotten a
bout it,” rather than that Flicka had decided to punish Georgie in a spectacularly cruel way.
Maybe Georgie deserved to try to face her fears, melt into an incoherent puddle on the floor, and have everyone from her childhood and current best friends laugh at her failure.
It would serve her right.
But she would never be able to walk as far as the piano in front of all those people, so Flicka couldn’t have her poetic justice.
“Anyway,” she said, “I can’t do it.”
“I can help you,” Alex said.
“And how could you do that? Hypnotize me? Doesn’t work. Psychoanalysis? There’s nothing there.”
“Of course not, but I don’t want you to play for them.” He leaned across the piano again, and his hair slid from behind his shoulder and hung, reflected in the black gloss of the piano’s lacquer. “I want you to play for me.”
Georgie stared down at her spidery hands hanging over the black and white piano keys. “I can’t.”
He walked around the piano and stood beside her, his slim hip right beside her cheek. A faint, masculine scent wafted from his clothes, a cologne, something soothing like green herbs. She was acutely aware that she could lean about six inches over and unzip his fly with her teeth.
Alex said, in a low, soft voice, “Play the middle C.”
She laid her thumb on the white key right in front of her waist and held it there, but she didn’t push down.
Alex stroked her arm from her elbow to her wrist with the back of his hand, soothing her. “Play it.”
She told her finger to push down, and she let the weight of her arm fall on her finger that was curled above the keys.
Her finger collapsed and wouldn’t press the key.
Alex shook his head, and his long hair swished over his shoulders. He turned his hand over so that his palm was on her wrist, and then he slid his hand over hers, covering her fingers on the keys with his own. The calluses on the pads of his fingers felt hard on her knuckles.
He stepped behind her, still not moving his fingers over hers. Warmth from his body drifted out of his suit jacket that opened around them, spreading over her bare back, and his cologne filled her nose like she was walking in the fields around Tanglewood.
He leaned over her, stretching his arms on both sides of her, caging her.
His whisper brushed the skin on her neck. “I’m not forcing you to do something you don’t want to. I’m letting you have what you want most, what you crave, but you dare not admit, even to yourself.”
“I’m afraid,” Georgie admitted, her voice breathy from fear at pressing that note and from his body so close to hers.
“Everyone is, in the beginning,” he said. “It can be terrifying to have an experience so desired, so primal, that you lose yourself. You have to trust me to take you through the place that terrifies you, to keep you safe, and to hold you until you emerge on the other side.”
Georgie couldn’t seem to catch her breath or move away from him. “We’re still talking about the piano here?”
Alex chuckled.
“Just the piano,” she said, but she leaned back, almost imperceptibly, maybe an inch, so that his mouth was so near her skin that his breath was a hot circle on her bare shoulder, and the scent of champagne in his mouth rolled down her skin.
“Let me do it for you, first,” he whispered.
Georgie closed her eyes, and the weight of his finger forced hers down.
A single note, a C, rang out of the piano and jarred against her skin.
She jumped, trying to flinch back, but Alex’s strong back was behind her and she only succeeded in pushing herself against his body.
His throaty chuckle beside her ear focused all her attention on her skin and her body, not on the piano.
She felt his other hand find her hip, and Alex rolled her pelvis forward, scooting her to the front of the bench. He climbed onto the bench behind her, straddling his thighs around her and pressing his chest to her back.
His business suit was very fine wool, and his white shirt was silky. The smooth material rubbed Georgie’s bare spine. The light chains that dangled down her back rolled against her skin.
Even just feeling with her back, his body was hard under the blue suit, rounded with muscle, and tight in the waist. His thighs pressed her hips and were thick with sinew under the thin fabric.
He leaned back and straightened the silver chains dripping down her back, and she thought that he held them for a moment because the band around her neck tightened across her throat. The chains fell against her bare back, and his body warmed her skin again.
He stroked his hand down her arm again, back down to the keyboard, and his strong fingers pressed three of hers down in a simple C-major chord. The notes vibrated through her until she was trembling.
“Shhh,” he whispered, his chin above her shoulder. She hadn’t realized that he was quite so tall, but he was. Georgie was five-feet-eight and used to being nearly the height of most men, but Alex was a lot taller than she was. Even his hands, lying over both of hers, were bigger and stronger than hers, and she had strong fingers from so many years of playing the piano.
He lightened his weight on her hand and released the chord, and her arm floated up with his. He moved their hands up the keyboard and pressed her hand down into the keys again, forcing her fingers to play a G-major chord.
This time, the shock of the loud clang and the panic in her blood almost drove her to her feet, but Alex slid his other arm around her waist, locking her body to his.
“You can do this,” he whispered.
He pushed her hand down again on the board, a G-minor this time, a sad note that tugged at her heart.
Breath dove into her lungs, and she gasped, looking at her hand on the keys with Alex sitting right there behind her. Her body wanted to run.
Georgiana Oelrichs was the pianist, not Georgie Johnson. Georgiana Oelrichs was absolutely terrified of being discovered. These loud chords that drew attention made her feel like she was being choked.
Alex moved their hands back to middle C, pressed the thumb of her right hand, then her pinky on the G, then each finger going down through the C-minor chord, a theme from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, and he lightened his hand.
Georgie played the next few measures with his hand hovering over hers.
“Beautiful,” Alex murmured near her ear, and his lips brushed her shoulder. Georgie closed her eyes. “Keep playing.”
Her left hand crept up, and she played the next few lines of the sad, wintry music with her eyes closed, Alex’s lips grazing her neck and shoulder, and his strong arm pressing her body to his.
When her hands slowed and the music began to trail off, Alex nipped her neck with his teeth, a bright blossom of pain, and he growled, “Keep playing.”
And she did.
Georgie played all the way through the end of the movement, almost fifteen minutes, with Alex’s hand first above hers, then retreating to her waist, then lying on her thigh, still. Her fingers hesitated at first between measures, then smoothed in their playing, and then she played and was lost in the music and Alex’s warm body all along her backless dress.
When she was done, she lifted her hands from the keyboard in astonishment. “I did it.”
“It was incredible,” Alex said, still sitting around her. “Play something else for me. Play whatever you’re working on.”
Her fingers found the keys, and even though her heart fluttered in her chest while Alex’s breath heated her neck, she played the short art song that she had been practicing in the private music rooms at Southwestern State that week.
Alex’s smooth cheek rubbed her shoulder, and his soft lips nibbled her skin.
Somehow, she made it through.
Somehow, she finished it.
She lifted her hands from the keyboard. “Oh, my God. I did it.”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice whispered over her neck, “you did.”
“But I can’t do
that in front of all those people.”
“Just look at me,” Alex said. “Every second, I’ll be thinking about stroking your arm,” he ran his fingers down her arm, “or pulling you against me,” his arm around her waist drew her closer to him, pressing her bare back more tightly against the silky fabric of his shirt, “or biting the back of your neck.” His teeth scraped the nape of her neck.
Shivers ran over her skin. “I really don’t think I’ll be able to play a note if I’m thinking about that.”
“Yes, you can. I insist on it. Now, let’s discuss what song we shall sing for Her Royal Bossypants.” He stood and unwrapped himself from around her. “Do you know anything by Killer Valentine?” he asked.
“Not really. I don’t listen to pop,” she demurred, still stroking the keys in wonder that she had played with someone listening.
He walked back around the piano, and his eyebrows raised like she had said something shocking. His hand clutched his tie over his heart. “They’re not pop. They’re rock. They’re practically metal. They started off as East Coast Grunge.”
“Sorry,” and she shrugged. “I listen to so much classical that it’s pretty much all I listen to. I listen to modern stuff, though, stuff influenced by modern music, like Rhys Chatham.”
“Oh, well, Chatham,” Alex mocked. “A contemporary of Ozzy and Nine Inch Nails.”
“And I listen to Phillip Glass, although I like New Simplicity better than the atonal works. Wolfgang Rihm is good.”
Alex smiled. “I admit, it would be amazing to talk to someone about Wolfgang Rihm. After this little performance, we should have a drink and talk.”
“It didn’t sound like you want to get up there, either,” Georgie said, her hands still touching the keys.
“Pierre promised that he wasn’t going to ask me to perform last night because they had an orchestra, which was fine by me. But, new day, new rules. Evidently, Flicka’s rules.”
[Billionaires in Disguise 01.0] Every Breath You Take Page 8
